Reel of Fish VI
Wow, it's almost like I don't write anything BUT these movie reviews, and they're always later than I promised they'd be! It's almost like my life is a laughable failure! Ha ha ha! Ahhh. Ha.
Anyway. How about those Oscars? (Yes, that's why I'm about a week late. The Oscars. It's all part of my Grand Design. You can't be expected to understand the Grand Design. You don't have the drugs for it.) It was very important that I watch the Oscars, which I definitely did. It's not I like I lay in bed all night watching suicide_sam_e play Team Fortress 2 and eating a Brooklyn pizza from Domino's and then read the Oscar results online later. No. I put on a tuxedo and drank a glass of overpriced champagne and politely applauded for the Lifetime Achievement awards and other such bullshit and when I got up to use the can I paid my brother a buck to fill my seat. That's how serious I was about the Oscars. And do you know why? Well, let's go back to my last illustrious and critically-lauded edition of Reel of Fish, where I said - more or less:
No Country for Old Men is definitely going to win a ton of Oscars, including Best Direction, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture, and Best Supporting Lunatic for Javier Bardem. If these things are not true, may God strike me down with a thousand bolts of vengeful lightning, and may he do the same for my enemies if these things do come to pass, as they must, so it is written, forever and ever, amen. Also, on a seemingly unrelated note, Daniel Day Lewis will get another Oscar, this time for his role as a Timothy Dalton impersonator in what I think is some sort of B-movie horror flick called There Will Be Blood.
And everything I predicted has come to be, putting me into the same category as Mother Shipton and her horseless carriages, the Mayans and the end of the world in 2012, and Nostradamus and the famous worldwide war waged by the forces of good against the evil of Hister.
So clearly, my dedication to the Silver Screen has granted me some kind of SUPER POWERS. And that is why today I will tell you about a movie that I can tell you - concretely, such that you could place money on it - will go down history as the finest movie about midgets and death since Time Bandits.
Week 6 of 51 - In Bruges
Director: Martin "Doc" McDonagh
Starring: Colin "Dopey" Farrell, Ralph "Grumpy" Fiennes, Brendan "Sleepy" Gleeson, Clémence "Whose Line Is It Anyway? Jokes Are Only Funny For So Long" Poésy, and the extremely underrated Jordan "Howard T. Duck" Prentice, who also played a Giant Bag of Weed in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, thus launching him into immediate contention with Warwick Davis for the illustrious title of my favorite Hollywood lilliputian.
What It Is - Boy, that's a tough one.
In Bruges is rather like three totally disparate movies jammed into 107 minutes. There's an eccentric British crime comedy, along the lines of a Guy Ritchie picture; there's a surrealist Gonzo piece, full of drug-addled sequences, long mindbending camera swoops, and dwarves in Eton schoolboy caps; and a black-grin, twisty study of the dark-sweet lure of suicide and the horrors of dramatic irony.
Colin Farrell, for whom I have gained an enormous new respect after years of relative indifference bordering on dislike (viz: Miami Vice, Alexander and Daredevil), plays the highly emotional and thoroughly Gaelic hitman Ray, freshly off his very first and badly-botched job for the British mob run by the half-East End half-Klingon Boss Harry, played ably by the thoroughly insane Ralph Fiennes. Brendan Gleeson plays the mob's conscience, scholarly mob heavy Ken. Ken and Ray are in hiding in Bruges, Belgium's most well-preserved and famously boring city, until the heat goes off them for a bad hit. While touring the city they meet the lovely narco-nymph Chloë and the bitter dwarf actor Jimmy, and have an astonishing amount of madcap misadventures, illegal drugs, and violent psychological traumas until Harry shows up to kill everyone.
Comment il Rouler - In Bruges is a movie that brings us the basest Irish humor and the most delightfully imbecilic fat jokes coupled with painfully honest studies of what in life is worth dying for. It's a movie that celebrates cocaine and Belgian beers. It's a fairy tale and an urban legend and an O. Henry twist. It celebrates and belittles the eerily beautiful city of its namesake. It's a lazy, smoke-scented mid-morning dream and the slick gleaming barrel of a pistol across the face, shattering your teeth. It's got quite a lot of midgets in. I've written before on the subject of midgets in cinema - it's a subject I feel quite strongly about, and is central to the plot here.
Colin Farrell, to his everlasting credit, embodies my strange love of the little people with his combination of outright admiration, morbid fascination, and doofy grinning when he's in the presence of such an honored personage as Jordan Prentice (who, lest we forget, played Howard the Freakin' Duck). There's just something fascinating about a midget in a movie, and writer/director McDonagh ever-so-cleverly places the midget in this movie as a midget in a movie (or did I just blow your mind?). For his part, Prentice perfectly plays the arrogant American actor and insecure paranoiac dwarf, and provides some of the most memorable hilarity in the movie, as exemplified in every trailer for the movie ever played anywhere ever ("You don't know karate - UGH!" "You just gotta know where to look for 'em. Brothels are good.").
Hilarity abounds in the movie. The polarized Odd Couple banter between Ken and Ray crackles and wanders far afield. Fiennes is nothing short of genius in his role as the psychotically honorable family man/London capo Harry, smashing the scenery so he can chew it more readily. There's snapping, vicious wit and delightfully humorous bouts of ultraviolence (I particularly enjoyed it when Ray blinded a skinhead by shooting a blank in his face), and wry sarcasm and dry European humor and a whole smorgasbord of lightly blackened laffs. The bit where jowly avuncular Ken takes a gram of cocaine off of Ray and goes to the bathroom, only to return and peer at little Jimmy over Ray's shoulder, both of them with eyes like gimlets, makes me giggle even when I think about it now.
Of course, parceled with all that high-quality British jesting, you get the vast bitter ocean of dramatic irony, the "black" part of the black humor (the black humor, you no doubt remember from your various Classics courses, being black bile, or melancholy, of "and the Infinite Sadness" fame), and an awful lot of grim, gory, fantastically unpleasant deaths for a lot of very nice people. See, I picked In Bruges because I was hoping to break the trend of the last 6 movies I've reviewed, all of which featured the usually-nasty deaths of 85-100% of the involved protagonists by the final reels. "Ah, good," I mused to myself as I lazed over my eggs (côté ensoleillé vers le haut) and sirloin (medium rare with a light balsamic glaze) one bright morning, paging through the New York Times movie section, "A light-hearted Snatch-esque criminal romp featuring Voldemort, Mad-Eye Moody, AND a drunk midget! This should be a delight!"
And it was, don't mistake me! The movie had me larfing hard enough to spew Sprite (I'm on diet soda every day of my life now, for which my teeth have graciously thanked me, but I need lemon-lime at the movies and they just don't serve it Diet. I'm going to have to start packing flasks of illicit Diet 7-Up) through my nostrils. It had some genuinely heartwarming bits and, as I may or may not have mentioned, a hilarious dwarf (he played Howard the Duck). But it was, sadly, the Seventh Seal in the long line of movies where - alarma del interceptor aerodinámico - every-god-damn-body dies.
Although to its credit, In Bruges kills everyone as part of what is actually a pretty clever joke. Looking back over the movie, it almost seems like McDonagh was sitting in a pub and suddenly had an idea (spoiler alert again - the idea was about midgets) that was so funny he had to sit down and write a movie about it, a movie which kept growing more and more absurd and twisted as he forewent sleep and inhaled massive doses of powdered acid washed down with absolute gallons of stout, but which was ultimately building towards the one moment of purely Euripidean tragic irony.
To be even fairer, not everyone dies, maybe, although the ending is one of those vague fade-to-black-with-vague-narrative ones that sometimes make me want to gnaw the armrests of my theater seat, glazed with ancient buttery topping and the salt of thousands of clammy palms though they may be. But quite a few people die, in ways both beautiful and ugly, symmetrical and jarring ... well, I guess it's all ugly and jarring, but that doesn't mean it can't be beautiful, if you're willing to look at it in that creepy glaze-eyed American Beauty way ... or if it's in Bruges. If nothing else, Martin McDonagh has convinced me to add Bruges to my TTDBID list, my "bucket list" (to borrow a term from a movie I have no intention of seeing without heavy medication). Just as Harry muttered, the city's just like a fuckin' fairy tale.
Endgame - It is safe to say that you will see things you have never seen before In Bruges. You will laugh at jokes you'll wish you'd never heard and you'll see some truly unspeakable things happen to some genuinely nice people for no good reason. You'll probably learn some things about bell towers, the Belgian film scene, the dangers of blank rounds, and the consequences of punching Canadians. At the end you'll be left with the faintly uncomfortable sensation that you've just been to a party you weren't invited to; a lingering feeling of unease, a thorough hangover, and your conscience's seersucker coat rumpled with the wallet left in the wrong pocket. It's a movie worth seeing, but it's not all karate chops to midgets and Colin Farrell making jokes about retarded farmboys. You'll laugh 'til it hurts, but there'll be times when you'll want to cover your eyes, to look away, or to just get up and leave. Don't give in. An eternity in Bruges may, as Ray suspects, be what Hell is like, but an hour and forty minutes there can do you a world of good.
Anyway. How about those Oscars? (Yes, that's why I'm about a week late. The Oscars. It's all part of my Grand Design. You can't be expected to understand the Grand Design. You don't have the drugs for it.) It was very important that I watch the Oscars, which I definitely did. It's not I like I lay in bed all night watching suicide_sam_e play Team Fortress 2 and eating a Brooklyn pizza from Domino's and then read the Oscar results online later. No. I put on a tuxedo and drank a glass of overpriced champagne and politely applauded for the Lifetime Achievement awards and other such bullshit and when I got up to use the can I paid my brother a buck to fill my seat. That's how serious I was about the Oscars. And do you know why? Well, let's go back to my last illustrious and critically-lauded edition of Reel of Fish, where I said - more or less:
No Country for Old Men is definitely going to win a ton of Oscars, including Best Direction, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture, and Best Supporting Lunatic for Javier Bardem. If these things are not true, may God strike me down with a thousand bolts of vengeful lightning, and may he do the same for my enemies if these things do come to pass, as they must, so it is written, forever and ever, amen. Also, on a seemingly unrelated note, Daniel Day Lewis will get another Oscar, this time for his role as a Timothy Dalton impersonator in what I think is some sort of B-movie horror flick called There Will Be Blood.
And everything I predicted has come to be, putting me into the same category as Mother Shipton and her horseless carriages, the Mayans and the end of the world in 2012, and Nostradamus and the famous worldwide war waged by the forces of good against the evil of Hister.
So clearly, my dedication to the Silver Screen has granted me some kind of SUPER POWERS. And that is why today I will tell you about a movie that I can tell you - concretely, such that you could place money on it - will go down history as the finest movie about midgets and death since Time Bandits.
Week 6 of 51 - In Bruges
Director: Martin "Doc" McDonagh
Starring: Colin "Dopey" Farrell, Ralph "Grumpy" Fiennes, Brendan "Sleepy" Gleeson, Clémence "Whose Line Is It Anyway? Jokes Are Only Funny For So Long" Poésy, and the extremely underrated Jordan "Howard T. Duck" Prentice, who also played a Giant Bag of Weed in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle, thus launching him into immediate contention with Warwick Davis for the illustrious title of my favorite Hollywood lilliputian.
What It Is - Boy, that's a tough one.
In Bruges is rather like three totally disparate movies jammed into 107 minutes. There's an eccentric British crime comedy, along the lines of a Guy Ritchie picture; there's a surrealist Gonzo piece, full of drug-addled sequences, long mindbending camera swoops, and dwarves in Eton schoolboy caps; and a black-grin, twisty study of the dark-sweet lure of suicide and the horrors of dramatic irony.
Colin Farrell, for whom I have gained an enormous new respect after years of relative indifference bordering on dislike (viz: Miami Vice, Alexander and Daredevil), plays the highly emotional and thoroughly Gaelic hitman Ray, freshly off his very first and badly-botched job for the British mob run by the half-East End half-Klingon Boss Harry, played ably by the thoroughly insane Ralph Fiennes. Brendan Gleeson plays the mob's conscience, scholarly mob heavy Ken. Ken and Ray are in hiding in Bruges, Belgium's most well-preserved and famously boring city, until the heat goes off them for a bad hit. While touring the city they meet the lovely narco-nymph Chloë and the bitter dwarf actor Jimmy, and have an astonishing amount of madcap misadventures, illegal drugs, and violent psychological traumas until Harry shows up to kill everyone.
Comment il Rouler - In Bruges is a movie that brings us the basest Irish humor and the most delightfully imbecilic fat jokes coupled with painfully honest studies of what in life is worth dying for. It's a movie that celebrates cocaine and Belgian beers. It's a fairy tale and an urban legend and an O. Henry twist. It celebrates and belittles the eerily beautiful city of its namesake. It's a lazy, smoke-scented mid-morning dream and the slick gleaming barrel of a pistol across the face, shattering your teeth. It's got quite a lot of midgets in. I've written before on the subject of midgets in cinema - it's a subject I feel quite strongly about, and is central to the plot here.
Colin Farrell, to his everlasting credit, embodies my strange love of the little people with his combination of outright admiration, morbid fascination, and doofy grinning when he's in the presence of such an honored personage as Jordan Prentice (who, lest we forget, played Howard the Freakin' Duck). There's just something fascinating about a midget in a movie, and writer/director McDonagh ever-so-cleverly places the midget in this movie as a midget in a movie (or did I just blow your mind?). For his part, Prentice perfectly plays the arrogant American actor and insecure paranoiac dwarf, and provides some of the most memorable hilarity in the movie, as exemplified in every trailer for the movie ever played anywhere ever ("You don't know karate - UGH!" "You just gotta know where to look for 'em. Brothels are good.").
Hilarity abounds in the movie. The polarized Odd Couple banter between Ken and Ray crackles and wanders far afield. Fiennes is nothing short of genius in his role as the psychotically honorable family man/London capo Harry, smashing the scenery so he can chew it more readily. There's snapping, vicious wit and delightfully humorous bouts of ultraviolence (I particularly enjoyed it when Ray blinded a skinhead by shooting a blank in his face), and wry sarcasm and dry European humor and a whole smorgasbord of lightly blackened laffs. The bit where jowly avuncular Ken takes a gram of cocaine off of Ray and goes to the bathroom, only to return and peer at little Jimmy over Ray's shoulder, both of them with eyes like gimlets, makes me giggle even when I think about it now.
Of course, parceled with all that high-quality British jesting, you get the vast bitter ocean of dramatic irony, the "black" part of the black humor (the black humor, you no doubt remember from your various Classics courses, being black bile, or melancholy, of "and the Infinite Sadness" fame), and an awful lot of grim, gory, fantastically unpleasant deaths for a lot of very nice people. See, I picked In Bruges because I was hoping to break the trend of the last 6 movies I've reviewed, all of which featured the usually-nasty deaths of 85-100% of the involved protagonists by the final reels. "Ah, good," I mused to myself as I lazed over my eggs (côté ensoleillé vers le haut) and sirloin (medium rare with a light balsamic glaze) one bright morning, paging through the New York Times movie section, "A light-hearted Snatch-esque criminal romp featuring Voldemort, Mad-Eye Moody, AND a drunk midget! This should be a delight!"
And it was, don't mistake me! The movie had me larfing hard enough to spew Sprite (I'm on diet soda every day of my life now, for which my teeth have graciously thanked me, but I need lemon-lime at the movies and they just don't serve it Diet. I'm going to have to start packing flasks of illicit Diet 7-Up) through my nostrils. It had some genuinely heartwarming bits and, as I may or may not have mentioned, a hilarious dwarf (he played Howard the Duck). But it was, sadly, the Seventh Seal in the long line of movies where - alarma del interceptor aerodinámico - every-god-damn-body dies.
Although to its credit, In Bruges kills everyone as part of what is actually a pretty clever joke. Looking back over the movie, it almost seems like McDonagh was sitting in a pub and suddenly had an idea (spoiler alert again - the idea was about midgets) that was so funny he had to sit down and write a movie about it, a movie which kept growing more and more absurd and twisted as he forewent sleep and inhaled massive doses of powdered acid washed down with absolute gallons of stout, but which was ultimately building towards the one moment of purely Euripidean tragic irony.
To be even fairer, not everyone dies, maybe, although the ending is one of those vague fade-to-black-with-vague-narrative ones that sometimes make me want to gnaw the armrests of my theater seat, glazed with ancient buttery topping and the salt of thousands of clammy palms though they may be. But quite a few people die, in ways both beautiful and ugly, symmetrical and jarring ... well, I guess it's all ugly and jarring, but that doesn't mean it can't be beautiful, if you're willing to look at it in that creepy glaze-eyed American Beauty way ... or if it's in Bruges. If nothing else, Martin McDonagh has convinced me to add Bruges to my TTDBID list, my "bucket list" (to borrow a term from a movie I have no intention of seeing without heavy medication). Just as Harry muttered, the city's just like a fuckin' fairy tale.
Endgame - It is safe to say that you will see things you have never seen before In Bruges. You will laugh at jokes you'll wish you'd never heard and you'll see some truly unspeakable things happen to some genuinely nice people for no good reason. You'll probably learn some things about bell towers, the Belgian film scene, the dangers of blank rounds, and the consequences of punching Canadians. At the end you'll be left with the faintly uncomfortable sensation that you've just been to a party you weren't invited to; a lingering feeling of unease, a thorough hangover, and your conscience's seersucker coat rumpled with the wallet left in the wrong pocket. It's a movie worth seeing, but it's not all karate chops to midgets and Colin Farrell making jokes about retarded farmboys. You'll laugh 'til it hurts, but there'll be times when you'll want to cover your eyes, to look away, or to just get up and leave. Don't give in. An eternity in Bruges may, as Ray suspects, be what Hell is like, but an hour and forty minutes there can do you a world of good.